By Frank PortmanThe release date for King Dork Approximately the Paperback and King Dork Approximately the Album is October 4th, less than a week away. It’s kind of hard to believe. It’s been such a long time coming, yet it still has managed to sneak up on me, as it were. The music part is the first MTX album in twelve years. Pulling that together just on its own took some doing, I can tell you.But it’s also the realization of a plan that goes all the way back to 2005, when the band had ceased to function along with the entire under- and over-ground music industry, and I started writing what would become the unexpectedly successful novel, King Dork. When Tom Henderson, the book’s narrator, began to write songs in the narrative, it was perhaps inevitable that I’d try to write some of them for real alongside their fictional counterparts in the book. And that’s exactly what happened. I half-finished the novel with a handful of half-written songs.​